LGTM: Shipit!

Jordan Weir is working at Riskfuel on a machine learning product that seems about ready to massively disrupt the derivatives trading market.  He uses kubernetes to run thousands of computer cores against millions of data points to get answers in seconds that take traditional industries days or even weeks to calculate.   The value of having competitive intelligence in the world of investing is so great, that the banks and hedge funds are going to be beating down his door in the next couple of years. This stuff is mind-blowing.  Not to mention their little side project to capture the business of the European insurance market. Yeah, pretty much the whole thing. Keep an eye out, this is big stuff!

Mark Ando and I have worked at the same companies together for years. Some of my most enjoyable memories of coding come from the time when we'd sit together, side by side and work on each other's puzzles.  It was so nice to catch up with him and learn some of his wisdom about the importance of friends in the workplace. How to price yourself as a freelancer or an IC employee. How do we care for the team members around us? What can we learn from working in different types of environments... And how we should have sent that guy pizza when he said he'd buy a pizza for 10,000 bitcoin.  This was such a fun interview for me and I hope you enjoy it even 1/10th as much as I did.

Daniil Molodkov shows what I found to be some quite surprising vulnerability here. We touch on topics including Imposter Syndrome, Burnout, and what differentiates the smart students from the best students. The answer might surprise you.

Easily, one of my all time favorite people to work with, Jeff and I discuss the course of his career, including his first role at a digital agency, his time in consulting, the physical analytics startup he joined through to his current placement as a backend engineer at a conversation intelligence AI startup.  We talk about when you should worry about the "Big O" and the intricacies of using search engine technologies. I think we can all learn a lot from Jeff and I hope you enjoy the chat we have.

Get in touch with Jeff on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-hm-wong/. 

In this interview, Arthur Lorena tells us about his, with a mother who was a COBOL programmer he first fell in love with technology.  He talks about his time working in Brazil, moving to Canada and the reasons he chose Klick as his first employer.  We eventually get to his thoughts on what makes a so-called "10X engineer" and what behaviors we can adopt as developers in order to become one of them.  I had a lot of fun with this interview and I really hope you enjoy it as well.

Ky Patterson is a Senior Fullstack Developer with Klick Health.  In this two part interview we discuss his career, how he feels about react, when to stay away from it, and when it is appropriate to use it.   We talk about his days at the "web 1.0" version of a meal delivery service, using QBASIC to write an HTML client and XML parser and, the challenges of moving from an hourly business model to a product based one.  I hope you enjoy the episode, please feel free to leave feedback.

Ky Patterson is a Senior Fullstack Developer with Klick Health.  In this two part interview we discuss his career, how he feels about react, when to stay away from it, and when it is appropriate to use it.   We talk about his days at the "web 1.0" version of a meal delivery service, using QBASIC to write an HTML client and XML parser and, the challenges of moving from an hourly business model to a product based one.  I hope you enjoy the episode, please feel free to leave feedback.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be interviewing professional programmers about their experiences in the industry, thoughts on technology, and how they became the leaders that they are.

I hope that together we can all grow and improve in our craft. I would like to spark productive and respectful discussion about how we solve big problems.

I’m going to be talking with the people whose work I admire. I’ll be asking them about the spark that drives them and how they look at problems. I’d like to hear stories about the craziest bugs they’ve met, the biggest wins or, just the stories of the projects they’ve worked on, applications they’ve built and their impact on the world around them.

How do you lead teams in the development of software? How do you mentor, encourage and grow developers in the early stages of their careers? How do you protect your projects against the inevitable small mistakes they make or the huge ones you do?

How do you decide which technologies to choose for a given job? Why are there so many Javascript frameworks?

[pause for laughter … it’s a podcast, nobody’s laughing. Note: do not read the stage direction]

It’s a definitional property of professionalism that we engage in continuous and deliberate self reflection on our performance. That we continually strive to improve our practice. That we never stop learning and growing in our role.

I hope that in having and sharing these discussions, we can all learn from each other and grow as individuals and as community.

While the discussions will be allowed to go where they lead, I do hope that as an interviewer I’m able to guide these conversations towards developing valuable insights into the business and craft of professional software development.

I also hope to raise the profiles of not just programmers in general, but programming as a craft and vocation. I want to find some way to convey the true majesty and power of software and celebrate the people who create it.

Think about this for a second. Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, all programmers. Where would Elon Musk or Jack Ma be without programmers? Look at the biggest companies in the world right now, where would they be without programmers?

What sector doesn’t rely on software? What business isn’t aware that a software might come along and revolutionize their industry?

If software is the engine that our economy runs on, I’d like to talk to the people behind it.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be pre-recording and editing a number of interviews. When I have enough content recorded, I’m hoping to be able to maintain a weekly delivery schedule. As this is my first podcast, I would love your feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.

I would be deeply honored if you’d join me for these stories, if they sound like they’d be of interest to you, I’d appreciate it if you’d subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a comment to let me know what you think and maybe share it with a friend.